sorry fickle fanatic
friendly fuzzy teddy bear
beetle on its back trying
to turn over with a pen
from a bouquet of pencils
bouncing ink stain firewall
bouncy ball

sitting on a turnstile
with tessellated tiles
counting liars for miles

I'm sorry if I'm being such a fickle fanatic.
Should I be ashamed? I am confused.
I just want to be a fuzzy teddy bear
but I'm just an angry beetle
on it's back trying
too hard
to turn over
and I feel guilty now.
I turn over and inside out
with the help of a pen from a bouquet
of pencils bouncing on ink stains
firewall bouncy ball
sickness
I feel uneasy

I'm sitting on a turnstile
watching the tessellated tiles
as I count liars for miles

shuffle shuffle click click

sorry girlboy
boygirl **** that
find some ******* friends,
you fuzzy teddy bear
you're a beetle trying
to lay on its back and turn over

try writing with that pen
you'll find it's a bouquet of truths
pick one out and run with it
they're all just bouncing
ink stains

You sit there on a turnstile
watching hundreds of your selves
shuffle shuffle on click clicking
you count yourself over and over
and you're the tessellated tiles
you're watching yourself
counting liars

On winter nights beside the nursery fire
We read the fairy tale, while glowing coals
Builded its pictures. There before our eyes
We saw the vaulted hall of traceried stone
Uprear itself, the distant ceiling hung
With pendent stalactites like frozen vines;
And all along the walls at intervals,
Curled upwards into pillars, roses climbed,
And ramped and were confined, and clustered leaves
Divided where there peered a laughing face.
The foliage seemed to rustle in the wind,
A silent murmur, carved in still, gray stone.
High pointed windows pierced the southern wall
Whence proud escutcheons flung prismatic fires
To stain the tessellated marble floor
With pools of red, and quivering green, and blue;
And in the shade beyond the further door,
Its sober squares of black and white were hid
Beneath a restless, shuffling, wide-eyed mob
Of lackeys and retainers come to view
The Christening.
A sudden blare of trumpets, and the throng
About the entrance parted as the guests
Filed singly in with rare and precious gifts.
Our eager fancies noted all they brought,
The glorious, unattainable delights!
But always there was one unbidden guest
Who cursed the child and left it bitterness.


The fire falls asunder, all is changed,
I am no more a child, and what I see
Is not a fairy tale, but life, my life.
The gifts are there, the many pleasant things:
Health, wealth, long-settled friendships, with a name
Which honors all who bear it, and the power
Of making words obedient. This is much;
But overshadowing all is still the curse,
That never shall I be fulfilled by love!
Along the parching highroad of the world
No other soul shall bear mine company.
Always shall I be teased with semblances,
With cruel impostures, which I trust awhile
Then dash to pieces, as a careless boy
Flings a kaleidoscope, which shattering
Strews all the ground about with coloured shards.
So I behold my visions on the ground
No longer radiant, an ignoble heap
Of broken, dusty glass. And so, unlit,
Even by hope or faith, my dragging steps
Force me forever through the passing days.

The rooster swivels on its axis returning
coarse wind into the pyre of mad, mad tongues
raving alongside charred ivory. Lifted by sorry hands
from dying embers’ embrace and eased with foreign pity,
ceremoniously, into a cardboard crate wheeled against
the traffic, stumbling backwards through yellow canvases,
between my family dressed in black, to dress the void (deck),
mourners spitting soda into their cups, as word paddle upstream,
onto a thin futon within four walls stained with unfinished ghosts.
The doctor removes the white shroud like God coaxing pink light
on the first day and wine oozes through elastic veins to the far corners of my skin thin ventricular walls. One crack, in the doors and in my chest, paramedics in white blur in, heel first,
Pan-island couriers on reverse gear to the corner
of a numbered street, where I am delivered like a gladiator
thrown into the arena of nosy gazes, with the urgency of
hens clucking away from premeditated slaughter:
deep Christmas red on the tessellated parking lot.
Clumsy thumbs dialing 599, I moan inwardly
to the concentric circles of strangers retreating, erasing
me from cell-phone cameras. Then like a flip animation I
snap backwards, up 21 floors,
pause for about an hour on the ledge before smashing
backwards, back down, past kids scratching graffiti off the cement
and growing cigarettes in their mouths. The rain ascends and I take
wet cash from the driver while I fidget on the leather and throw up
mediocre coffee into my cup. I dig into my throat and return the bread
to its plastic bag and when the cab stops I fall left out onto another parking lot,
moonwalk up the stairs to where I unwrite my name in the
annals of failure and
shove the Fs of my past back
then
I take the bus instead.

the tessellated tile floor of my existence,
once alabaster white
has sullied under the steps
of a muddied life
spent wading in the river bank
attempting to coalesce
a series of seemingly random events
into a fabricated web
spun of the finest thread.
only to find the ephemeral now
a fractious flowing river
so violent and cold
from the melting spring snow,
whitewater breaks
against primordial stone
like titan thunder atop olympus,
rattling our bones
because legends follow entropy
but chronos begets chaos in mythology.

We always joked that we wouldn't be **** buddies.
Anything involving *** will not work for an asexual.
We'd be cuddle buddies.
The second we'd meet up, we'd hug and cuddle.
We wouldn't do as most long distance 'couples' would.
We'd just cuddle.
Maybe I could finally fall asleep.
Something's changed between then and now.
You've changed.
When you stopped caring, I'm not sure.
But you did.
You stopped caring about me and that's okay.
Something got in between us.
Not just distance
I still can't help but think how nicely our bodies tessellated.
Even with 1047 miles between us.

I
 
Fold upon fold
your origami letters
map  thoughts,
images and moments
of three days,
two nights.
 
Now to unfold
the creased trajectories,
intersecting space,
following time:
bird-like flightpaths
on the radar screen.
 
Each coloured sheet,
placed on this desk,
becomes a tessellated diary,
and grows beneath the hand.
So generous a gift.
So readily received.

II
 
Ah, that's your secret:
the power of the list;
 this, then this,
 then freedom follows,
 knowing the necessaries
 dusted and done.

  Peaceful now,
  and watching the clouds
  cross the skylight,
  Bach decorates your soul
  with his meditations
  on the possibility of everything.

  How did you guess
  I love the detail of life-
  lived, up to the hilt:
  the embellishment of dreams
  pulled from the ether,
  sound and sense in tow.
 
III
 
I travelled North
in the seat opposite.
You didn’t notice me
as you gazed
through your reflection,
sighting the past.

When you look at me
you rarely blink or
glance away (as people do).
Poor nature,
She hasn’t a chance, has she?
Never a mote missed.

As my passenger
I shall care for your silence;
to let you loose on
unbidden thoughts
as they rise above
the scrolling hills.

Overcome by lassitude
I took out my typewriter
And wrote a letter
To

The rhapsodic songs
I kept singing all night
A resonant guffaw
For

150 words of poetry
On tessellated fabric
Written with thick black ink
In the memory of


The forgotten.

There's a theory in thermodynamics
For every reaction that occurs, some energy and order is lost to the universe
Heading towards complete disarray in the grand scheme of things
So naturally, right as things started to make sense,
As soon as my life clicked together in tessellated, repeating structures,
I followed the rules of my chemistry teacher and got black-out drunk
My life has become that floral shirt shirt you can't wear with anything
You thought it was pretty in the store-
They had it dressed up on a mannequin with sleek black pants
It looked edgy, and professional
But you aren't that mannequin

"I love you,"
Scrawled out as an afterthought
My handwriting increasing in size as I ran out of words for you
I have often been named a human dictionary, but I didn't want to give myself away this time
I wasn't even sure I wanted to leave a note
I taped it to the back of a painting
You'll find it eventually

The desert welcomed me with open arms, but was only a pause
Eighty years is a long time, and three days doesn't make a difference till the end
So my pocket radio cut in and out as I dipped into the grand canyon
They recommend a gallon of water per person,
But I figured a can of coke and a little soul could hold on for now

She wound up dead on a highway
"Bought a farm," said some of my favourite authors
"So it goes."


Her body's breaking down into smaller particles
Her hair is evaporating
All that's left is her ruined paint set in a plain white apartment

I don't even remember his name,
But at the time, I swore I was going to marry him
With as much conviction as someone with their finger halfway down on the trigger of a loaded gun
I have been fired at some odd angle towards bullet-proof glass
And for the first time in my entire life,
I don't know how I'm going to make it out of this

In the kitchen
of the top floor flat
I’m ignoring the dread
and preparing a sandwich

There’s garlic mayonnaise spread thick
from each seeded crust
tessellated lettuce
buttoned jalepenos.
It’s the ‘ham’ that confuses people-
you can’t tell that it’s quorn from within.

I cut it into squares,
my triangles were never neat enough.
Tomorrow as I crunch and bloat
I’ll be thinking of how to break the news
word the resignation
and sign it cursive sarcasm.

From now on,
no confused and
overbearing voice
will ask me-
‘I thought you were vegetarian?’

there are parts of me that force the pain,
that let it roil in my bones until i am breathless.
it builds until i exhale it in an herbal smoke,
or until i write it in a fervent and blood-rushed poem.

there are parts of me that don't feel the pain.
these parts are healed, and most days they win out.
they pervade the unhealed parts of of my heart,
and they fill me with an ecstatic joy.

there are parts of me that remember
and there are parts of me that forget.
there are parts of me that take in what i feel and use it
and there are parts of me that gladly let it drift away.

there are parts of me that are strong
and parts of me that are not,
and mostly i only show one part or the other.
i have no in-betweens,
and that's why i am me and why you are you.
i believe that's why someone fell out of love with me
and i believe that's why i am so changeable, so wild, so full of doubt.

i am pieces and parts,
broken and lovely,
tessellated and electric and free.

Last night we shared a rock in the sand. We sat close, sipping off a large bottle of red wine. Watching the silver silhouette of the waves and the dance of the moonshine in the current, we passed the bottle back and forth and drank. In silence we were mesmerized. The moons reflection played there in the surf from someplace beyond the water, within it, vanishing and re-lighting and then vanishing again, like a game of sparks, of white hot fireworks, winking for us between each rise and fall of the waves. She was lost in the beauty of it and I was beside her lost all the same in its beauty and the beauty of the moment. The wine warmed my cheeks from the cool autumn breeze riding in onto the shore. She rested her head on my shoulder. All night long as we held the nakedness of one another, our figures tessellated beneath the sheets, I dreamt of the waves and the moonshine-sparks and her hair on the ***** of my neck. I dreamt of it all the next day. I write these words with the dream still fresh in my imagination. I am still dreaming of it; of her and the moonshine in the waves and the shape of her body flush against mine in the sheets and the softness of her skin and I cannot remember the moment before I fell asleep there but I can remember awakening and she was in my arms in the morning. My hands felt every curve of her flesh. I held the kiss, like one holds back tears, and then I kissed her. She moaned and squeezed my hand in hers and slightly lifted a corner of her lips. I fell back asleep. Now, for eternity, I shall be cleansed each time this dream returns, and left wondering at a curious emptiness when it falls away, until it washes over me again. Such is the way she comes and goes – a dazzling display of hot white flames and sparks – more magical than the light of the sun.

(c) Rafael Alfonzo

Can you believe?
I almost let a ******* job blow my brains out
steal me from my kids and love
this system rots us inside out

it makes us dissolve and **** our selves back through a straw
and say we still aren't enough
the catharsis of it all is slipping
oozing through life not on our terms
this capital is rot incarnate.
Death encapsulated in a hermetic chamber

I breathed my last labored breath face beneath a pillow
and woke up to failure
a failure that could start the rest of life
failing up for us
is giving into the quit.

Brain unlocked, heart bound in broken promises
to children and now fear of lack of value
and resource to feed them full.

This prison immolated
crystal chandelier  impaling
only pretty to them
when stained with our blood
soaked geometry splattered
tessellated across the porcelain walls

they only smile when we weep

staring at us in our cage
as we writhe
and they dine
on the blood of our infants
on their labor not yet
realized.

Eating our children and us
right before our eyes
out of the sunlight

they only laugh when we have nothing
they only feel when we hurt
they're only full when we are starving
only sated when we need.

monstrous predators of money
and greed
they only smile when we bleed

I take a pill each morning--
"to keep the madness away,"
declared the doctor,
her tone clinically nonchalant
as she handed to me
a prescription for
small, white tablets
that leave a bitter chalkiness
in your mouth
when you've left them
on your tongue
for too long
before swallowing.

But
there is only so much
modern-day pharmaceuticals
can remedy.

Sometimes,
I can still hear her,
you know--
sweet.
lost.
mad
Alice
scratching at the
tessellated patch-work
of my psyche.

I can still feel her
as my fingertips flit
across the liquor bottle--
"Drink Me,"
it murmurs.

Curiouser
&
curiouser
I become with
every shot.

When the room
starts lurching,
when I am too
dizzy to stand,
I close my eyes only
to find that the world
is still spinning.

Or perhaps
I am just falling.

Yes,

D
   O
       W
            N

the rabbit hole I go.

And, as I plummet,
the phosphenes of colour
behind my eyes
transmute into the most
peculiar images:
a mercury-tainted top hat
encompassing the harlequin
countenance of a man
as crazed as I;
the trundling wings
of a Jabberwock
and the heaving snout
of a Bandersnatch;
a pocket watch,
its face lustrous and
encrusted with Jadestone--
"Time. It's time!"
it chimes.

"Time for what?"
exclaims the girl
in the periwinkle petticoat
(she appears simultaneously
excited and terrified
by the impending chaos).

"Bloodshed,"
reckons the squire
of the pocket watch--
the March Hare,
a grisly little thing
in a tattered waist jacket.

"Bloodshed, bloodshed,
off with her head!"

And that girl in periwinkle?

Why that girl is me,
and the Queen of Wonderland
has dealt her cards--
she'd like my head
(and my heart).

But
sweet.
lost.
mad
Alice
has a trick of  
her own to deal--
a Wild Card
tucked beneath her sleeve.

She is capable of imagining
at least six impossible things
before the high is over,
you know.
All it takes is a
simple flutter
of an eyelash
and then,
gripped between
her fingers,
appears a substance
foreign to Wonderland--
***.

"Bottoms up--
for with this,
I shan't feel a thing,"
she surrenders.

"What?"
roars the queen
upon her arrival.
"You will not fight?
Why, you must be mad!"

"Haven't you heard?"
replied Alice.
"All the best people are--
Cheers."

Tessellation & Interstices


”A tessellation or tiling is the covering of a surface,
often a plane, using one or more geometric shapes,
called tiles, with no overlaps and no gaps…In mathematics, tessellation can be generalized to higher dimensions and a variety of geometries.”

the insistent need to be distinguished
means many are not,  
indeed,
this hunger
to be an influencer
and never just an influencé.

creeply creates a linear surface,
a flooring to be trod upon,
a tessellated plane,
were we each fit in
right-tight juxtaposition
and we are noticeable for our
uniformity and

the scuff marks of having been trod upon,
well used.

it is in the chips of irregularities,
the overlaps and the gaps
where we touch and connect
with our individual Ah Ha’s,
where our Venn Diagram Lives
intersect, infect, interfere, inject,
in the tiny
interstices
tween us,
the jagged, irritatingly edgy
rubbings
that the friction of creativity
is comedically inseminated.

I love a good tense sweat,
that invasive, deep boring burring,
that demands
instant creative solutions lest the angst of
an unwritten-in-the-moment-poem
is even more annoying,
before it is annoyingly,
befogged, lost forever.

that is why with old age,
fearsome fast
short term memory loss,
some turn to the speedy freedom of
free verse,
unconstrained by socks
and well fitting shoes,
and the slip on sneakers
of rhyming,
so insistent on perfection,
that the
burr is absorbed,
the irritant rubbing is creamed away,
and that loss of
a pouring of the soul’s ******* of
Done!
is
our exclamatory mutual curse

I lost my grip and down I slid
And felt no urge to stop
My scanty power enveloped my will
As I succumbed to my downward spiral

The inevitable pulled its peaceful ruse
I felt dead before I died
The blackened fiend sat with twisted smile
And watched me breathe into airlessness
Down down I slid into the well
Where no wishes or hope or light do dwell

And there at the bottom amongst the nothingness
Love scooped me up in gentle palm
And placed me amongst the shattered souls
Pieced together by second chances
And slowly there on tessellated plains
My Life began again

Put down the conversations
You overheard in the taxicab
Engrave the clauses
A shadow falls over the morbid epiphanies.

Draw life into these lines
Tessellated ,Portray your potential
Efface the curse from within yourself
The fire on cold winter nights spreading all around

The truth is a secret
The farce guides the mortals
The leftover part is a reverie
Eyes wide open, white light blinding the soul

Railroad tracks of broken dreams and thoughts
The journey is incomplete
Reality cringes into the pleasant daydreams
I'm still eavesdropping the conversation of the dead.

The train passes from over my soul.
The trees echo my dreadful silence.

this wouldn't be the first time
someone's said that you can't
put a knife through the preacher,
even when he's not practicing what he's preaching.

he's a delicate flower,
he's just facing the sun and
praying for photosynthesis

Preacher's got a sunburn,
he's a silly dude, sittin' in the field
in the blistering heat

bright bidden barley
comes sicken roasted now,
like a frostbitten politician lectures a sandy hook victim,
telling his soft couch he just won't have it anymore.
who's the prophet today, anyway?

black.
all I see — is black,
and a glow -
maybe some tessellated patterns over screenlit skinforms,
writing like they think they know what they're doing
I love what they've done to me
but I hate what I've done for them
I want to curl 'em like I'm squeezing a lemon
I want to weave a web of thunder with my skeleton
Bend me like an antenna to get reception
I'll swing my hips to your
pulse's rumpus

tickle my neurons
with your featherduster delusions

sometimes I stare at screens
because the flow of photons
over my pupils form rivers
over my retinas that sound
a thousand frames per second softer than tears.

When times were better -- before you met her and decided that love's string was only so long and not longer -- our arms were stronger so we held each other more tightly, cat's cradles weaved around us. It was then that you thought of me and said I will build you a memory palace and into it you packed the smiles you filled like balloons on the hard days, compliments arranged as tessellated tiles, the promises you gave to build better tomorrows. I walk through it now, past windows that let in the light of crashed moons. I walk through it now, through doorways that guard empty rooms.  I walk through it now, waiting for the stones to fall and bury me.

Time is an angel,
Decay, slow rotting
Love and vengeance plotting.

Girls drown in crowns,
whiskey, and tessellated tides
Sharp edge, triangle swords
Surrounding all sides.

Boys point arrows
Sharp, yet crooked
And fly from flower to flower
As a sparrow

All of everything ticks by
Into itself
Of itself
By itself

3,454 and a half.
Hexagonal.
Tessellated.

2.
Heart-shaped.
An infinite rhythm.

Please tell me i'm not as forgettable
as your silence is making me feel
listlessness in conversation
The white sky, blank. Sour air.
No emotion, no feeling

The rustling of the music on the radio
voices coming in and out of frequency
almost like the faint voices of myself in my ear
calling, begging for me to get over it.

I thought we were tessellated,
but were both a handful of hexagons
that just don't sit right.

The days are going so slow,
but my heart is beating so fast,
thinking about us.

The truth is,
you could break my heart in two,
but when it heals it beats for you.
Because love defines all,
everyone needs love,
you would let yourself get hurt
go beyond and above
over and over again just to prove to yourself
that they are for you,
just accept it!

...But its not for me to say stop trying,
because if he came back i would most certainly
lay my clothes down for him to walk over.
He is precious.
And he knows it.

Way down yonder in the paw-paw patch
Bang in the first measure
Came the congenital seizure
Skewing the first invention from scratch.
The campfire skied its sparks
Into the ghost-ridden void,
The skittish tchotchkes
Of paradox and entropy
Quirks and tics as dumb as bricks
Until a headstrong mongoloid
Started groping for rhythm
In the quavering spasms.

Oh, but it was a jawdropper
A bang-up tour-de-force
A horrorshow time-warper
Of Luke and Kirk and spice,
The good apple ran the table
Till the old goat hacked the matrix
And the young hawks did their mind-tricks
Of a tessellated cat’s cradle...
And paparazzi made the odyssey
From planets Claire to Z
To dish how cosmic *******
Trysted protomolecule
As the major ghosted ground control...
In all, a very large array
Of bingeworthy groundhog days.
Lukewarm confabulation
Of the smoking embers
From the essential tremor
Ceaseless oscillation
Between good cop and bad copper.

And the girl scouts chorus
With cheeks full of S’mores
“For all of your fables
Of hobbits and hubbles
And sabering at windmills
You will never untie the volition
Riddled into the convulsion,
Nor how the campfire kindles
Nor be one of us.
You will always ***** the pooch
Halfway to the paw-paw patch.”

Nurse Dipso-Etheromaniac
And Dr. Thorazine-Brainiac
Shoved their two-part invention
Cold turkey into the clockworks,
Cleft lip
Fetal eyes
Flipper-fingered
Riddled with the shakes
Cold-shouldered him to another dimension
Where muggles punk ETs,
And their whiskey wizards
Serve up mock elixirs
Not some hair of the dog to undistemper
The secondhand DTs,
His doggo superpower.

Bill Grogan’s goat
(Bam bam bam bam!)
Was feeling frisky
(Bam bam bam BAM!)
Chased three red skirts
Across the galaxy...
“I knew you were one of the ***** boys
But why do your hands shake like that?
They flipper and gibbet all over the keys”
The sour-smelling teacher spat.

And the mean girls echoed
With tongues of acid
“See how they lurch and squirm!
You will never get to the paw-paw patch
You will never find dear little Susie
She will never teach you to hulu
And you will never two-step
With dear old Johnny
With fists of wiggle worms.”

He touched off the fireworks
Torching all your pomp and cirque
In some skullduggery
Of **** and villainy.
I, Dropout
Outcast
Clonetrooper
Mutineer
Hitched a ride north of the watchtower
Where imperial walkers with hooves of ice
Stomped the land flat, and late-blooming
Summer never shakes the phantom menace
Of the winter that is always coming.

Somewhere in the interstellar distances
Of Kantian prairie perturbed by auroras
Like those night-blooming skyflowers
I glimmered back into existence.
I drank with wildings dropped with the dead
And vaped the contrails of the mad rocketeers
(Kid Rambo, Def Louie, Jedi Freddy and Manny
Steampunk Sal and Wig Out Johnny)
But never found sweeter ******
Than the next bridge to burn.
I, callow flamethrower
Of Shiva, the destroyer.

Marshall Gunpowder Jehoshaphat Miller
The bad apple of the force
Hatchet-faced and porkpied
Dead by ****** suicide
Born again old-schooler,
Packing halitosis
From ossified canon
Skywalked me down.
Gospeled me like Luke
And knee-capped me with a curse
Shame; the oldest mind-trick in the book.
I served out my prodigality
In Ludovico therapy
Which for a half-life, somewhat took.

Headlong into retrograde
I crashed the zero-sum arcade
Fed a quarter into the supercollider
And with some crazy tic of the wrist
Spooked the ball’s trajectory
So it champagne supernovaed
And spat out the shabby ghost
Of a birthright lottery.
Thirteen golden statues.
But as the digits flipped
And the mission crept
As it does to one and all
Faster than a cannonball
I flashed back to renegade.

And the made girls chorused,
With cheeks full of Botox,
From their partial-view suites
And partner-track perks
Of bottomless cups
Of shut the **** up,
“You nearly made the grade, you!
But then you had to mouth off job-hop Hulk
Out, which finally betrayed you.
Now Security Guard Miller
Will escort you off the premises
For a reckoning with your nemesis
Regret, the silent killer.”

True, for a season I was a bluepilled moon
Marooned with space junk
And cypherpunk
Doomscrollers
Of deadend might-have beens,
Like the lunar sonata’s
Primal whisper of futility,
Until it tripolars
Into ultraviolent agitato
And hits escape velocity

Now loosed from orbit of the Goldilocks planet
I tumble through space in dumbstruck rapture
Of hurricaned stars and thundercloud nebula
I tremble in the thousand-parsec stare
Of the headless horde of dark riders
That stampede the stony hobbits,
Through the looking-glass of lightyears past
I see monstrous galaxies in ungainly copulation
Blushing Hiroshimas of atrocious release
And multi-sunned planets where misbegotten
Beings shudder into self-consciousness,

While I drift toward the event horizon
To be gobbled into the enigma
With a little gasp of gamma
Hammerstricken wires frisson.
Where the eleventh measure of the first invention
Counterclockwise corkscrews
Way down yonder in the paw-paw patch,
After a very long array of groundhog days
My skeleton crew bunch into alignment
Like that hunch of spooky entanglement
Or just possibly like that eternal dissonance
Quelled by a quanta of true arrogance,

In a clockwork grotto
Grows a chrysalis F-sharp
Where fingers at last Goldilock
Into queasy equilibrium,
To my dumb surprise
The dark sac butterflies
And there is Susie
A little tipsy
On hard compatibilism,
With hips of pulsars
And hands of auroras
She hulus like the time warp
Not spasm without rhythm
But otherworldly vibrato.

Words of love so often stale and
die with the lips that utter them,
And go to the wormy realm of
the bone and the root and the gem.

And yet I do not dread the sidereal
silence of the tomb
When, like the stalwart evergreen,
the legend of our love will bloom

Our stories entwined, and chiselled
into history's marble pages
Our light will blaze like all the stars
Through the dark and through the ages

For we will prosper in my art
as the rose that lives and breathes,
And tread the gleaming aisles of glory
but not as kings festooned in wreaths

Nor as Byzantine manikins
from walls of tessellated gold
Nor simulacra, cast in bronze
each from the same heroic mould

But as creatures of light and shade
with just a spark of the divine
Where, mulled by bellies full of fire,
our blood flowed rich and warm as wine

With velvet slipper, wing of gauze
And robe of black and yellow plush
The Queen hoards treasures in her home
Enough to make a pharaoh blush

And here she lolls and dines upon
her jelly and her pollen cake
Inside a tessellated hive
like something Byzantines would make

The foragers are on their rounds
and as the yawning flowers unfold
They let the bees buzz in to load
their gleaming freight of powdered gold

They've flown their fusty catacomb
to breathe the air of perfumed bowers
To haunt the velvet labyrinths
and silken chambers of the flowers

And once inside, they feast upon
each tiny toothsome nectary
For nectar is the stuff of Gods-
A taste of Immortality

While in her home, upon her throne
the Queen sits fearing an attack-
It won't be long, she knows, until
her workers stab her in the back

For though she lives a gilded life
of bee-bread and of honeycomb
More intrigue swirls within her walls
than in the courts of Ancient Rome